Today is canceled

It's supposed to snow today. Every newscast for the past 24 hours has hyped this upcoming storm, the first supposed major snowstorm of the year.

I live in central Maine, so the forecast is for 4-8 inches of snow, before turning to a wintry mix, before winding down tonight. It's supposed to be windy. Nothing I haven't experienced before in my 47 years of winters.

So why are cancellations pouring in from all over, scrolling across the bottom of my television screen? If you choose to live in a winter environment, shouldn't you be able to cope with snow and wind? It used to be expected.

I don't think taxes and a preponderance of services is what's killing our state. I think it's that there is so little time in the year when business actually gets transacted.

We don't do anything all summer because the kids are home from school and it seems like every HR person and hiring manager is taking their 6-8 weeks of vacation time that they apparently have (I have two weeks). Then, between T-giving and Xmas, nothing gets done because everyone is out during work time shopping. Add to the stew of non-productivity the day before, the day of, and the day after a winter storm, which once again means reduced time in the office, and it's no wonder that Maine's economy resembles that of a third world nation.

It snows in Maine. Deal with it!

A prosperous faith

Sunday mornings now find me at the gym. I joined Planet Fitness in Auburn in an attempt to keep my fitness momentum moving forward during the dark days of winter. For the past several weeks, my goal has been to visit the gym 3-4 days per week, where I engage in 50-55 minutes of weight lifting, and another 30-45 minutes of cardio.

Weekdays, I tend to get up early and arrive by 5:30 a.m. in order to get my reps in before heading to the office. On Sunday, Planet Fitness doesn't open until 7:00, so I have to go a bit later.

This Sunday morning routine finds me on the treadmill or elliptical machine during part of my longer, two hour session. Being tethered to an exercise machine results in you being captive to the row of televisions projecting a mix of Fox propaganda, infomercials, and local weather at the AM fitness crowd. One program on The Discovery Channel that I've tuned into the past two Sundays is popular preacher, Joel Osteen, he of the great head of hair, as well as the nation's largest congregation, Lakewood Church, in Houston. To say his theology is suspect, would be putting it kindly. Like so many prosperity preachers, Osteen dispenses with the message of self-sacrifice, and living for others--in essence, Jesus' gospel--and has crafted a message that overflows with pure positivism. Osteen has distilled the Xian life into a series of steps (seven, to be exact), which if followed, guarntees that our existence will be happy, healthy, and blessed with everything that would make this life wonderful.

Actually, I haven't invested more than about 10 minutes the past two Sundays, kicking the tires, so to speak, on Osteen. When someone is hyped as much as he is, and you have some experience with movements that follow a man, then a few minutes listening to what someone like Osteen has to say, since he's wildly popular, is just staying abreast of an opponent, in my opinion.

Interestingly, in catching up with my Long Reads Twitter feed, I came across this article from The Atlantic Online, written by Hanna Rosin, provocatively titled, "Did Christiantiy Cause the Crash?"

Rosin's lengthy, well-written piece explores the prepondarance of preachers that peddle the prosperity message to tens of millions of Americans. While Osteen gets a mention, there are many other messengers that are promoting a brand of Christian faith that is a different kind of animal than the one I once embraced, and different than espoused by traditional evangelical theology. The article provides a blow-by-blow account of the gullibility of many that profess to be following Christ. It also shows that P.T. Barnum's adage about suckers is still alive and well in America.

Called by God

One of the things that I've gleaned from tracking stats for this site (beyond never having as much traffic as I'd like) is that writing connected to me, personally, seems to do much better, and attracts more hits, than most commentary on politics and culture. My music posts also do quite well, as well as anything tied to sports, although the post on Tiger Woods landed like fart in church.

With that in mind, and since I have quite a bit of material "in the can" that isn't ready to publish in various other forms--plus I have a desire to "test run" some of it--I've made a decision to post it at Write in Maine, my blog targeting writing--my own and the writing of other formidably more talented writers.

If you've been visiting Words Matter for awhile, you know about my experiences, "shipwrecked" in Indiana, after washing out as a student at Hyles-Anderson College, in beautiful Northwest Indiana, America's post-industrial armpit. In two weeks, it will be the 26th anniversary of our son's birth in Hammond, Indiana.

If you would like to know a bit more about my experiences in Indiana, and how I ended up there, head over to read my most recent post, about being called to preach.

There are times that I think I have a book about those unique experiences. Other times, I wonder if there is a demand for a memoir about a 22-year-old "kid" trying to find himself, thinking he's called by God to preach, and stranded with an equally young, pregnant wife, 1,500 miles from home, and the subsequent journey out from the bowels of a movement that was more cult, than actual religious movement.

My first in what I hope will be a series is called, "Call to preach."

Tiger tales

I don’t spend much time keeping up on the lives of celebrities. Since much of what passes for journalism is often no more than celebrity voyeurism, I have dramatically cut back on news watching, and my newspaper reading. Tiger Woods’ recent car accident is a case in point—not so much the accident, but the media fallout afterwards, and his apparent affair(s).

While tabloid fish wraps like The Enquirer, as well as publications like London’s Telegraph, and a slew of other North American mainstream pubs have been slinging salacious allegations about the world’s top golfer, there are precious few journalists out there delving into more substantive issues regarding Woods, his image, and other questionable activities that fan out far beyond this recent incident, whether or not it involves marital infidelity.

[Reuters photo]

One writer, who regularly covers a different side of sports than do most writers running that beat is Dave Zirin. His recent article at The Nation, where he serves as their sports editor, takes a look at areas of Woods’ reputation that never get talked about—his long-term relationship with Chevron, a company with an abysmal environmental record, not to mention their strong ties to Burma’s ruling military junta.

As Zirin notes, the press has been virtually silent about Woods while he’s made “deals that benefit dictatorships and unaccountable corporations, all in the name of his billion-dollar brand.” All of that’s ok. What he’s now being scrutinized over is his alleged marital infidelities, which are routine for entertainment types like Woods.

Zirin’s right—where was the press before now, when he was taking tainted millions from corporations, governments, and lending his name to golf courses in exotic locales built by slave labor—they were silent. Of course, in America, corporate malfeasance and exploitation of people are much less serious "sins" than cheating on one's wife.

Check out Zirin weekly at his Edge of Sports site.

Post-Thanksgiving turkey talk

I’m still recovering from Thursday’s excesses. The extra four pounds I packed on has been halved, however. I hit the gym hard both Friday and again this morning, mixing in weights with an hour of cardio each time. By Tuesday morning, which is weigh-in day, I anticipate being back to my pre-Thanksgiving weight. Not too bad, and actually, if I hadn’t engaged in an evening binge of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and creamed onions, just a mere four hours after a dessert of pumpkin pie and apple crisp, I might already be back to my low ebb. I guess one food binge in 23 weeks isn’t too bad.

I spent time doing other things besides eating the past few days. One of the wonders of having time, and not being forced by work, and life in general to approximate a hamster on a wheel, is it gives us time to reflect, and even reconsider our modus operandi.

Over four days, I read, spent some time with my wife and son (home from Brown), played cards, and watched an amazing panel discussion yesterday, on C-SPAN2’s BookTV. The panel featured Chris Hedges, George Packer, and Sam Tanenhaus, taped a few weeks back, during the Miami Book Festival.

The panel, on “politics and culture” allowed all three authors to talk about their new books. Rarely are three erudite and articulate authors featured on television. In fact, television has long ago decided that it would rather trot out blow-dried talking heads and guests playing around the borders of credibility, rather than providing viewers with something more than mere sound bites, or endless harangues back and forth between so-called experts.

Chris Hedges, in describing his latest book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, a book he details by way of synopsis as a book about how Americans are “the most illusioned (sic) nation on the planet; we have become utterly disconnected from who we are, what we represent and where we are going—and replaced it with fantasy.”

Some of what Hedges discussed as part of the panel is the same ground that the late Neil Postman tilled two decades ago, when things weren't as dire. Hedges brings a critique of capitalism, however, into the mix, which I think puts his content into a more contemporary window than a mere rehash of Postman.

Packer, a longtime writer for The New Yorker, has released a book of essays called, Interesting Times: Writings From a Turbulent Decade. The essays are what Packer termed “long-form narrative journalism,” a type of journalism that is almost disappeared, outside the pages of a few print publications, one of them being The New Yorker.

Packer describes his book as being about places in the world—East and West Africa, Burma—that have fallen off the radar in the post-9-ll world we now inhabit. Packer, in unpacking one of his essays, about the civil war taking place in the Ivory Coast, described a group of 12 and 13-year-old soldiers that he met while in their country. They were all wearing t-shirts featuring the faces of either Osama Bin Laden, or George Bush.

When Packer asked these kid soldiers about their t-shirts, their thoughts and ideas were a “crazy mish mash” of images and slogans and ideas—some if it coming from hip-hop culture in the U.S. and some of it paying homage to Islamic jihadism.

After he had these conversations, Packer was able to have another discussion with an Italian doctor in the country working for a humanitarian medical organization. When Packer shared his conversation, and the images on the two t-shirts, this doctor said that this was a “perverse affect of globalization,” and called it “contagion by media.”

Today’s world is such that 24/7 media, via images that are broadcast through the web and global satellites, rather than knitting the world together, seems to be driving the citizens of that world apart, perpetuating violence and conflict.

Global media tends to frustrate, and promote alienation, according to Packer. The images that they are exposed to are selective, and provide an “intense, but very narrow view of the world.”

Americans, on the other hand, are receiving “sanitized” views of the wars taking place across the world. We’re bombarded by information and images, but rather than providing clarity and complexity to our thinking about the world, rather, most Americans hold a very simplistic, black and white view of the world.

Packer’s book of essays chronicles the world from the events on 9-11, to the rise of Barack Obama’s political star.

The third panelist featured, Sam Tanenhaus, spoke about his new book, The Death of Conservatism, a book that traces the lineage of modern conservatism, a form that Tanenhaus characterizes as “movement conservatism,” in contrast to the “traditional” form of conservatism that most right-wing gas bags, like Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck, know little about.

Tanenhaus argued points about how Republicans must moderate their focus on ideological purity if they are to return from the political wilderness and offered a historical context, talking about Edmund Burke, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon (who Tanenhaus characterized as “one of the most liberal presidents of the modern era.”

While Hedges was a bit “testy” during an exchange with Tanenhaus, the interplay, and the response to the audience members’ questions were some of the most interesting analysis I’ve listened to for quite a period about the current place we’re in here in America, with Hedges and Packer extending this out into the global sphere.

Interestingly, since joining the gym several weeks ago, I now am treated to semi-occasional glimpses at news channels, like Fox, while on the treadmill, or using the elliptical trainer. I rarely can watch more than one segment, but that brief look at what news has become—mere entertainment, with a veneer of credibility—is what Tanenhaus was talking about.

Here is the link to CSPAN’s archive of the panel.

There is an amazing sequence around the 26:00 minute mark, with Hedges answering a question, and gives a real clear delineation of what has happened to capitalism, with the shift from a “penny capitalism,” which Hedges describes by way of his experiences growing up in a farming community where farmers brought their wares to market and were paid, to the current form—described by Hedges as “corporate capitalism,” which he makes the point has radically upended American politics.

This 5-6 minute section is well worth watching for anyone that would appreciate hearing a clear understanding of where we are, and even, how we got there. It’s the kind of trenchant analysis you’ll never hear on Fox, CNN, or sadly, even NPR, which has become an apologist by-and-large for corporate benefactors.

I’m looking forward to reading all three of these books. I’d go a step beyond and say that if you are fortunate enough to have sophisticated friends, or family members that still care about narrative journalism, any of these three books would make an excellent Christmas gift.

In response to a question about Obama, Hedges refers to him as a “brand,” much like Calvin Klein, or Benetton were able to brand themselves with HIV/AIDS culture through ads trivializing the disease back in the-mid-1990s. Obama has not veered at all from the policies of the Bush administration, despite the ideological hoopla passing as journalism, as well as the antinomian tendencies of many on the right, and even on the pages of mainstream publications like the Wall Street Journal that likes to pose as an institution of "old journalism," but at least since Rupert Murdoch took over ownership reins, more and more resembles the far right's print cousin.

As Hedges accurately indicates, Obama is a mere “figurehead,” and has been “emasculated” by corporate interests, the very same interests that have orchestrated the single largest wealth transfer upwards in American history, from the working and middle classes, to the rich.